Thursday, October 16, 2014

Climate Change Odds and Ends

Recently, I have not been commenting on climate change news,
mostly because either (a) developments and new research don’t change the
overall picture significantly, or (b) because it wasn’t clear whether some
developments did indeed constitute significant good or bad news. At this point, I feel comfortable putting
most of the news in category (a) – because for every piece of good news, there’s
a piece of bad news.

So, in no particular order, here are some of the things
worth noting as extending our knowledge but not changing the overall trend.

First, in the last two years Arctic sea ice minimum has seen
a rebound from the awful 2012 season, to a point somewhere around the 2007
(initial plunge) state. This appears to
be a result of a prolonged negative North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) during
melting season, which has allowed ice volume in the Central Arctic to recover
in 2013 and then stay the same in 2014.
The NAO, in turn, seems to be related to the lack of an el Nino event –
of which, more later.

This would be good news except that it is counterbalanced by
two pieces of bad news. Second (that is,
the second piece of news), it turns out that southern seas were undermeasured
until now and the amount of heat they have absorbed is much greater than originally
thought. Thus, the “momentum” towards
global warming already in the system is greater than we thought. Third, it now appears that 2014 may well be
the warmest year on record, if present trends hold, easily beating 1998, that
old standby of climate change deniers.

The fourth piece of news again is positive: the el Nino event that seemed very likely to
have unprecedented force (and therefore leading to a giant leap in temperature
as in 1998 is now projected to be weak and to start between October and
December. Fifth, the bad news associated
with that is that the weakening of el Nino is related to unprecedented warming
in the waters off Asia that spawn el Ninos – warming that again adds “momentum”
to the underlying global warming trend.

The sixth piece of news is that the slowdown in US carbon
emissions does now appear to be real, and related to a significantly faster
uptake of solar energy than anticipated.
The seventh bad piece of news is that this has had zero effect on
overall emissions, due especially to China’s increases in use of coal, plus
effective exporting of other countries’ emissions to China via
outsourcing.

Finally, we may note an interesting argument recently put
forward in Daily Kos: fracking is not
really economical, since each source is much more rapidly exhausted than in the
case of conventional oil. However, it
seems clear that, even were this so, we are still in for several years of
carbon pollution from that source, as natural-gas fracking companies seek to
hide their losses by sweetheart deals with state and local governments that
reduce the cost of drilling for new sources and taking care of the side effects
of the old exhausted ones.

Wayne Kernochan

About Me

I have recently retired. Before retirement, I was a long-time computer industry analyst at firms like Aberdeen Group and Yankee Group, and before that a programmer at Prime Computer and Computer Corp. of America. Sloan/MIT MBA, Cornell Computer Science Master's, and Harvard college degrees. Used to play the violin, and have written unpublished books about personal finance, violin playing, and the relationship between religion and mathematics, as well as three plays, two musicals, a screenplay on climate change, short stories, and poetry. I intend to use this blog in future both to continue to enjoy the computing field and to pursue my interests in many other areas (e.g., climate change, history, issues of the day).